


Domain

by Whisper132



Series: The Parabola Continuum [16]
Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-29
Updated: 2011-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-23 14:46:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/251501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whisper132/pseuds/Whisper132
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Osamu finally gives in and invites his friends over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domain

Osamu's choice was between compromise and Gin moving out. He could cave on an issue he'd held fast on for two years, or he could reacclimate his digestive tract to cup noodle breakfasts and convenience store dinners.

He knew he was getting old when he chose compromise.

"They'll be here in an hour," Gin said while running a feather duster over the television for the third time that afternoon. "Did you put the beers in the fridge?"

"Yeah, but warm's fine for these guys. We don't need anything fancy." In fact, the fancier and more sophisticated Osamu's place looked, the worse the teasing would be the next time he and the guys went out. If he heard about how it took a real man to be his wife one more time, he was going to kick a guy in the crotch, best buddies or no.

"Do you think I made enough food?" Gin holstered his feather duster in his apron and moved to hover over the table full of izakaya-themed snacks he'd labored over all morning.

"You made too much," Osamu grumbled. "If you feed them, they'll want to come back."

"So?" Gin stirred the oden. "It saves money."

What Gin probably meant was that Osamu only got to smoke freely when he went out with the boys, and the price of Osamu's brand recently went up. While they weren't strapped for cash – they were suspiciously exempt from a mortgage in their new place – Gin still made unhappy noises when Osamu arrived home "smelling like an ashtray." He said it devalued their furniture. Osamu didn't give a crap about the furniture – the white leather stuck to his ass when he watched TV in the morning.

"Hey listen," Osamu said, scratching at his stomach. "I don't want you expecting too much out of this, okay?"

"I'm not expecting anything." Gin turned a solemn face to Osamu. "I'm just tired of you pretending like you're living on your own when we've been living under the same roof for two years."

Damn, had it been two years already? No wonder he felt like such an old fart.

"Not to mention that we've being going out for over fi-"

"Anything that could be illegal doesn't get put into the count," Osamu said, cutting Gin off before they started _that_ argument again.

"So we've been seeing eachother for only two years. The three and a half years before that we just coincidentally ran into eachother when I accidentally discovered the key to your apartment?" Gin walked away from the food spread and came to stand behind Osamu. "There's nothing to be ashamed of," he whispered into Osamu's ear before letting his teeth graze across Osamu's earlobe.

Fucking cheater.

"Do that when the guys are here and you won't get to add a third year-"

"Sixth."

"- _third_ year to your damn count." Osamu reached a hand up and pulled Gin down for a quick one. "Relax and stop being a pain in the ass about everything. The food looks good and the place is clean. Just don't tell them how old you are and everything'll be fine."

"Osamu."

"Yeah?"

"Go put clean pants on."

********

Osamu's friends brought beer, cases and cases of beer. The coffee table in the entertainment room was covered with more than Gin thought the five assembled men could drink in one night, especially combined with the case he had chilling in the refrigerator.

"Nice place, Watanabe." Gin knew the man talking was called Fujimoto. They'd had a run-in once, back when Gin was still in middle school, and Osamu talked to him on the phone often. He didn't sound like such a bad guy.

"How the hell do you pay for it with your crap salary? They can't be paying you that much more than they pay me, even if you are teaching at a fancy private school now."

Gin watched Osamu twitch.

"We split the cost of the house," Gin said, moving into the room with some cold beers. "We have to cut some corners, but we get by." They had practiced answers to the most likely questions to arise. Gin would avoid mentioning that he was still a college student, that they didn't pay anything for their ridiculously large home (a gift from Gin's father), and that the reason Osamu now worked at a private school was because rumors were starting to go around the old neighborhood and they (Gin and his father) felt it best for Osamu to start afresh in a new environment (closer to Gin's university).

"I never would have thought of you as a guy with a respectable house," said a man whose sense of hygiene appeared lower than what most thought Osamu's to be.

"Yeah, well, uh, I guess everyone's gotta get it together sometime." Osamu scratched at his head.

"We were surprised when you didn't take that study fellowship and decided to teach middle school math."

"Such a waste."

"Total waste."

Gin caught the tail end of Osamu giving his friends some kind of gesture. If Osamu thought he was going to start hiding things, he was sorely mistaken. "What's this all about?" Gin opened a beer for himself and sat down in one of the armchairs, the couch being too full of Osamu's friends. "I've never heard about this before."

"You know better than we do how smart the guy is," said the hygienically impaired man. "One of our professors almost kicked it when he heard Watanabe wasn't staying on with the mathematics department."

Gin smiled at Osamu. "Is that so?"

"Guys, you're exaggerating." Osamu took a big gulp of beer. "You didn't come here to talk about me anyway."

"That's right," said a clean, bespectacled man. "I brought the magazines."

If they thought they were going to read pornography in Gin's living room, they had another thing coming. "Magazines?"

A copy of Modern Mathematics was tossed atop the beer cases on the table. "There's some really loose theories in here this month. I skimmed through and found at least ten things we'll have to include in this month's letter."

Gin rose from his chair. "If you'll excuse me, I'll just bring some of the snacks over. You gentlemen enjoy yourselves."

  
*******

  
"Shut up," Osamu hissed as soon as Gin was out of earshot. "I told you to shut it about that stuff."

"We thought you meant the herpes scare," Fujimoto said, taking a pencil case out of the bag he'd brought with him.

Osamu's stomach churned. "That, too."

"What about the time that girl set all your underwear on fire in front of the math building?"

"And remember that time when he got so drunk after exams that he ran around the dormitory naked and tried to get a tennis tournament started?"

"Or the time when-"

"Shut it!" Osamu gave his friends the finger. Why was he associating with these guys? "Let's get down to business. Morita, you got the red pens? We only made it through half the mag last time."

"Hey," Morita said, passing out red pens and fixing his glasses when they began to fall too far forward on his nose. "What should we call your…life companion?"

"Ishida. Ishida Gin," Gin said. "Would any of you gentlemen like something to eat while you work?"

  
*******

Once the men were at work, Gin had leisure to observe them and absorb the events of the last half hour.

"This equation is faulty," Fujimoto said.

Osamu nodded. "It completely ignores multi-linear time theory."

"Physics doesn't apply here," Morita argued. "It's a pure mathematics exercise."

"It can't be a pure mathematics exercise if it involves time travel." Osamu took his pen to the magazine's pages. "It's all crap."

What followed was a conversation Gin couldn't even hope to understand. Three men were for ripping the article and burning it while the other three were endeavoring to uphold it as a valuable something or other. In the process of arguing, the men consumed an entire case of beer.

Gin's cell phone rang.

"Hey, how's the big lunch thing going?" Chitose's voice was tinged with far more laughter than Gin cared to hear at the moment.

"They're…" Gin faltered. If he said the truth, Chitose wouldn't believe him and would storm over in a fit of curiosity and make things worse. "They're very nice people."

"Are they homeless? Kippei said they'd probably be homeless."

"They're not homeless. They're normal." Gin stole a look at the group in his living room. The previous debate seemed to be over as all six men were scrawling madly in their respective magazines.

"When you say normal, do you mean they're straight, or do you mean they're salarymen or something."

"Both."

"Any of them rich? We're looking for a nice guy for my sister and maybe we can land her a sugar daddy like yours."

Gin hung up and ignored the phone when it rang again.

  
*******

  
After two cases of beer, they were only a quarter of the way through the magazine. Even the dimwitted middle school kids he taught could figure out that the three cases of beer they had left were not going to cut it.

"So, Watanabe, tell us. You're the one who takes it, right?"

"Yuusuke, we all agreed we wouldn't pressure him about relationship details." Fujimoto hit Yuusuke on the head with a rolled magazine. "Nobody asks you about you and your wife."

"That's because we all know who's taking it."

Then again, these assholes didn't deserve more beer, and there was no way Osamu was letting Gin bring out the cake they bought.

"Drop it," Fujimoto said.

Fujimoto could have cake.

"This isn't helping us get the job done," Morita said. His face was red and he was sweating. Osamu didn't think it was because of the beer. The guys had always had a few theories about Morita, but nobody ever thought asking was appropriate.

The doorbell rang and Osamu stumbled up from his place on the couch. The room swayed, but Osamu's current level of inebriation wasn't anything new. He could handle getting the door.

"Don't answer it," Gin said. "It's probably Chitose."

Osamu fell back onto the couch. This was not what he needed when they had serious work to get done. "We've still got ten pages to get through," he told the boys. "No more beers until we've at least done another five.

Yuusuke coughed and snorted a little of his beer out his nose. He looked to Gin then back at the group. "Watanabe's the one who takes it."

  
******

  
Gin rarely got to see Osamu concentrate on anything for a prolonged period of time. Osamu's nose scrunched up whenever he couldn't figure something out, and he tapped his red pen against the table whenever he got frustrated. If there weren't guests in the house, Gin might snuggle up behind the other man. After the snuggling, he'd rip Osamu's clothes off and they'd make a mess of the couch.

"Just get the damn door already," Osamu called.

Chitose wasn't giving up. He knocked in small spurts. They'd held out for twenty minutes but Gin had to admit that it was also getting on his nerves.

"Sorry for my friend's rudeness," Gin said, getting out of his chair to get the door. Once to the door, he yanked it open. "Go away."

Chitose grinned and held up a case of beer. "I brought a present. I wanna get down with the straight salarymen."

"Go home, Chitose." Gin blocked the door. "We don't need any more beer, either. Take it with you."

Chitose went up on his toes and tried to look over Gin's shoulders. "You were totally lying to me, right? They're really a bunch of homeless guys and you're covering for your man because you don't want to-"

"Don't call him my man." Why did they have to have this conversation every time they met? It was frustrating. Gin and Osamu had a normal relationship (with a few minor complications) and nobody belonged to anybody else. Osamu certainly never gave a damn about Gin's feelings most of the time because, if he did, he would understand that there was nothing wrong with saying they'd been together for nearly six years when his friends asked him about their relationship.

"Hey, Osamu! Long time no see!" Chitose had snuck past while Gin was distracted. Osamu was going to be pissed.

Osamu set his magazine down. "Go to the kitchen and get the snack platter from the fridge. We're getting hungry."

"I brought beer," Chitose said, holding up his offering.

"Fridge," Osamu insisted.

The dingy member of Osamu's group snickered. "How many guys you got living here, Watanabe?" He elbowed Osamu in the side. "Some things never change, huh?"

Chitose dropped the beer. "That's just disgusting." He looked at Gin. "No offense."

"This guy's way too young for Watanabe." Morita pointed to Chitose. "He's got to be a college student."

There was a deep silence.

"Uh, Watanabe," the dingy man said after clearing his throat. "How long did you say you two've been together?"

"Two-"

"About six years," Chitose chimed in. "Amazing, huh?"

More silence.

Gin began to calculate just how long he was going to be sleeping at his parents' house while Osamu's rage cooled down.

  
********

  
The questions were uncomfortable, even more so when his answers were met with congratulatory pats on the back from half his friends. Fujimoto, who'd known all along, shook his head.

"It's fine," Morita said after a long bout of thinking. "It may not have been fine at the relationship's start, but it's perfectly fine now."

"Did you do him before he was legal?" Yuusuke asked around the rim of his beer can.

Osamu gave him the finger and returned to correcting his magazine. "It's not like that."

"He was really worried about it," Fujimoto said, patting Osamu on the back. "He was really freaked out about it."

"Fujimoto, you _knew_?" Morita clucked his tongue at Fujimoto.

"The bonds of friendship required my silence on the matter." Fujimoto sounded like he hadn't been freaked out, too, which Osamu knew he damn well was. "I couldn't tell you about Osamu and his boy unless-"

"He's not _my boy_." A shiver ran up Osamu's spine at the word. He reached for another beer. He was perhaps four or five away from passing out and, at this rate, passing out sounded like a really nice option. Of course, if he got too much more inebriated, Gin would be pissed, and then they'd have a fight, forcing Osamu to apologize even though he wasn't sure what he was apologizing for or even _if_ apologizing was what he was supposed to do.

"But, technically, he _was_ a boy at the time we're referring to, and he was in a relationship with you, so you can't claim that the nomenclature was inaccurate," Morita snickered.

"No more beer for Morita," Osamu grumbled.

"I still want to know who took it first and when." Yuusuke leaned forward conspiratorially. "You can tell us, Watanabe. We're your friends."

"You're assholes."

"Given your current life choice-"

"Shut the fuck up, Morita."

  
********

  
"Hey, what's going on in there? They're laughing." Chitose moved to peer into the living room, but Gin pulled him back.

"Don't go in there," Gin said. "In fact, don't come here again, just jump off the balcony and go away."

"You're pretty pissed, huh?" Chitose scratched at his head. "I bet it's all going just fine. I mean, they're pretty drunk and stuff, so they probably won't even remember it, right?" He picked up a snack platter. "Just go give the drunk guys some snacks and they'll love you again, even if you did steal away their friend."

"I didn't steal anything. You're being ridiculous."

"Says the totally sane guy living with _Osamu._ Go, give them the snacks made with love." Chitose pushed the platter into Gin's hands. "I'll wait for you here."

"Don't drink anything. You're driving yourself home as soon as I know Osamu won't rip you to pieces when you walk in front of him."

Chitose made a shooing gesture. "Go! Your man needs you!"

Gin didn't have the energy to argue. He adjusted the snack platter and walked into the living room, sure he was going to get the cold shoulder. The reality was a bit different.

"Uh, I can totally explain this," Osamu said from underneath Morita.

Before Osamu could begin his explanation, the snack platter was on the floor and Gin was lifting Morita up by the back of his shirt. "Get out of my house," he growled. "Now."

Morita tried to run but he was still in Gin's grasp, dangling in the air. "It was just a little kiss," he squeaked.

"Uh, Gin, maybe you should put him dow-"

"I don't want to hear it," Gin interrupted.

Fujimoto rose from the couch and slowly approached. "Okay, it seems we have a very large misunderstanding." He snickered drunkenly. "Morita here was just wishing Watanabe well in his new life. Giving his blessings." He took a few steps closer. "Now put him down and we can all talk. We're all adults here."

"Barely," Yuusuke snorted into his beer can. Osamu hit him and beer spilled onto the couch.

Gin put Morita down. He didn't apologize because he wasn't at all sorry.

"Wow. That was pretty cool," Chitose said, jumping over the fallen snacks before making himself comfortable on the arm of the couch. "I've never seen you move that quickly."

"Shut up, Chitose," Gin and Osamu said at the same time. The sound of their voices together dampened Gin's rage, but only by the slightest.

Gin walked to sit in his chair. "Feel free to explain why you were kissing another man's boyfriend."

Osamu made a gagging sound. He hated the word "boyfriend" almost as much as he hated the monthly tea visits to Gin's family.

"He's damn good," Morita said, smiling. "You're a lucky man."

Yuusuke clamped his hand over Morita's mouth. "It was the beer," he said. "Morita here's a good guy, but he goes a little crazy if you give him too much." Yuusuke looked around at the empty cans. "Maybe we had a few too many."

"What he means to say," Fujimoto began, "is that Morita wanted to bring closure to a decades-long crush and could only muster up the courage to do it while intoxicated."

Yuusuke gave Fujimoto a thumbs up. "Yeah, that's what I meant."

"That's pretty romantic," Chitose sighed. "I read this one comic once where, um, nevermind."

"I think we're done for the day," Osamu said, standing from his chair and unsteadily collecting beer cans. "I've got my mag all marked. I'll email my draft to you guys tomorrow."

"Marked?" Chitose asked. "What do you guys _do_?"

"We do peer reviews of academic journals," Fujimoto said while grabbing Morita by the arm and leading him away. "It's just a hobby we started back in college."

Chitose froze. "So you guys are pretty smart, huh?" He looked at Osamu. "Even this guy?"

"His brain is so sexy," Morita whispered, struggling against Fujimoto's hold.

Gin cracked his knuckles. "Get him out of my house."

"The taxi'll be here in a minute. See you next month, Watanabe. We'll have it at the bar again." The group quickly shuffled toward the exit and Osamu saw them out. Chitose soon followed, leaving Gin and Osamu alone to clean up the mess in the living room.

  
********

  
Osamu hadn't even filled a bag of cans for recycling before he had to throw up, nerves and alcohol mixing in his stomach in a way he hadn't felt since his early college days. Gin, though obviously still pissed off, was right there behind him, rubbing his back while he spewed bile-tinted beer into the toilet.

"You didn't tell me there was competition," Gin said.

When a round of heaving subsided, Osamu wiped his mouth with toilet paper and flushed. "There isn't any competition. Don't be stupid." He let Gin pull him to his feet and help him toward the sink to rinse his mouth out. "Morita's just spent too much time at the office and had too much to drink tonight."

"He was grinding you into the couch." Gin ripped the lid off the mouthwash when Osamu's wet hands failed to open it. "He called your brain sexy."

"That proves he's crazy, right?" Osamu put a lot of effort into his image. He despised hard work, and if nobody knew he had a brain, nobody would expect him to use it.

"Osamu."

He probably should have told Gin about some of that stuff, though. And, really, he meant to do it, but the chance just never came around. At least now he could stop hiding all of his academic journals in the car trunk under the hood for the spare tire.

"Osamu, are you ignoring me or are you going to throw up?"

He couldn't tell Gin about the articles he wrote back in the day, though, or the one he had out circulating for review now. That would be too much, too soon. Also Gin would want to tell his parents so they could be proud of their son's…housemate.

Osamu stumbled back to the toilet.

"Careful." Gin moved behind Osamu again and rubbed his back. "Just stay here until you've let it all out."

Osamu's stomach hitched and he attempted to wave Gin off. "I can handle it from here."

"You fell and almost gave yourself a concussion on the toilet seat, Osamu."

The big, warm hands that had been sliding across Osamu's back moved to his shoulders. Osamu groaned and arched up into the massage. Then he threw up again.

  
********

  
Gin's life had reached a new low. He never expected he would have competition for Osamu, nor had he imagined that he'd walk into his own living room and find some jackass trying to suck his boyfriend's face off. He also never suspected that Osamu was moonlighting as a nerd, something he'd hidden away for six years. How could Gin have missed it? Were there signs? Did he just not pay attention?

"Gin, get off me. I gotta pee."

And, worst of all, while Osamu had been puking in the bathroom, Gin became shamefully aroused and they wound up doing it, stopping twice so Osamu could throw up. How could he be pissed at Osamu for anything when, at the peak of the other man's physical distress, Gin insisted on-

"Gin. Move it." Osamu shoved Gin out of the way and went to the toilet. He gave a blissful sigh while relieving himself. Gin, to his shame, found it to be kinda cute.

"I'll finish cleaning the living room," he told Osamu. After collecting their scattered clothes, he amended with, "after I shower."

Osamu turned and gave him a sluggish smile. "We got any of those snacks left?" he asked. "I'm kinda hungry."

Gin closed the bathroom door.


End file.
